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According to recent studies, bitcoin’s water footprint has increased by 278% since 2020.
According to an article by Alex de Vries for Cells Report Sustainability, mining operations will use 591 billion gallons this year.
According to a study, the annual water footprint of mining bitcoin has been increasing, using hundreds of billions of gallons of water.
The water footprint of bitcoin is expected to reach 591 billion gallons this year, growing 278% from 2020, according to estimates made by doctorate candidate Alex de Vries of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Cells Report Sustainability last week.
He noted growing water concerns in the western US and Kazakhstan, two major crypto mining regions, writing that “Bitcoin’s expanding water footprint must be considered in the context of escalating water scarcity.”
In order to unlock additional Bitcoin coins, mining operations depend on computers to execute complicated computations.
Water is utilized to cool the computer servers that power them and the air conditioning systems because this uses a lot of energy.
Since water is required to cool power plants that supply miners with electricity, water is also indirectly utilized.
These applications put additional strain on groundwater supplies and result in water loss through evaporation.
De Vries used Cambridge data from the massive bitcoin operations in the US to determine the indirect use, and then he compared that data with the water intensity of electric generation on each individual grid.
Including direct use, “the total water footprint of US Bitcoin miners could be equivalent to the average annual water consumption of around 300,000 US households, comparable with a city such as Washington, DC,” De Vries stated.
He advised miners to concentrate operations in regions that depend on renewable energy sources in order to decrease the impact of mining on water.
Nonetheless, there is still considerable uncertainty because the Cambridge data sample only accounts for 44% of all bitcoin mining activity worldwide.
In contrast, a UN analysis published in October that used alternative data discovered that mining produced a 255 billion-gallon footprint in 2021—much less than De Vries’ 415 billion estimate for the same year.
